School Violence Data Under a Cloud in Houston

By SAM DILLON

Published: November 7, 2003

HOUSTON, Oct. 31 — It was one of the most unforgettable of schoolhouse crimes: a disabled 17-year-old student was shoved into a boys' bathroom in her wheelchair by a classmate at Yates High School here, dragged to the floor and raped. Her attacker was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

Yet the Houston Independent School District did not include that rape, committed two years ago, when it came time to report the school year's campus crimes to the state as required by Texas law. And that is not the only school crime that appears to have been airbrushed from the official record.

On Oct. 3, 2000, a boy named Joseph Hamilton was "stomped and beaten" by another student in the cafeteria of Williams Middle School and was left injured on the floor, according to a school district memorandum, but the assault went unreported to Texas authorities. Last April, a 16-year-old boy was stabbed in the chest by another student at Washington High School; that attack was not reported, either.

In the last four school years, the Houston district's own police, who patrol its 80 middle and high schools, have entered 3,091 assaults into a database that is shared with the Houston city police but not with the Texas Education Agency in Austin.

In the same period, the Houston district itself has listed just 761 schoolhouse assaults on its annual disciplinary summaries sent to Austin. That means that the school authorities either have not reported or have reclassified 2,330 incidents described as assaults by the district's police.

The district maintains that its reporting has been entirely proper. Those who disagree point to damage they say can be inflicted on the careers of principals who accurately report a high incidence of disciplinary problems, and to the financing sacrificed by schools that lose student population to expulsion.

School violence reports have taken on new importance since President Bush made a national goal of holding schools accountable for test scores and campus crime. At his insistence, a new federal law requires states to use violence data to identify "persistently dangerous" schools, and Education Secretary Rod Paige, former schools superintendent here, is in charge of enforcing that law.

Experts say that Houston is not the only city underreporting its school crime problems. Earlier this year, school-based police officers rocked the Roanoke, Va., system in accusing principals and district officials of hiding incidents of school crime. In Gwinnett County, Ga., an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that thousands of fights and drug, sex and weapons violations had been left out of school crime reports.

Houston, however, has been held up as a pillar of the so-called Texas miracle in education, though it was battered earlier this year by disclosure of false school statistics: a state audit found that the authorities had failed to report properly thousands of school dropouts, giving the district an impressive-looking but fake dropout rate of just 1.5 percent.

Dr. Michael J. Witkowski, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Detroit Mercy, has studied Houston's school violence and crime reporting system and was a witness last year for two parents who filed suit over the fatal stabbing of their child at Deady Middle School here.

"They're cooking the books," Dr. Witkowski said of school officials. "There are dozens of crimes in Houston schools that you will not see on any official document. Teachers are assaulted, students are beaten up, and these things do not make it into the reports."

Terry R. Abbott, a spokesman for the Houston schools, denied that the district's reporting on school crime had been anything but thorough and accurate. "There is absolutely no indication," Mr. Abbott said, "that anyone in this school district improperly failed to report appropriate data to the state regarding campus disciplinary action."

Much of Mr. Abbott's explanation for the discrepancy between the district's figures and those of its police deals with fairly fine distinctions. For instance, he acknowledged that the rape of the disabled student had not been reported, but said the reason was that the district reports only offenses for which students face school disciplinary procedures. Since the rapist was jailed after his arrest, the authorities never bothered to expel him, and so the crime went unmentioned in the district's reports to Austin.

The April stabbing at Washington High also went unreported, he said, because with the assault still under investigation, no student has been disciplined. He said he could not explain why the attack on Joseph Hamilton three years ago had not been reported.

Mr. Abbott declined to make the Houston superintendent, Kate Stripling, or educators at Yates, Williams, Washington or any other school available for questions.

Texas law requires school districts to report incidents to Austin only when a student is removed from class for disciplinary reasons. As a result, Houston's not reporting crimes for which students were not disciplined does not appear to have violated the law, state officials said.